The manual is a veritable treasure trove of reproduction art as well as logo and patch designs, all featuring the worm logo. It's currently unclear whether this will ultimately affect the Kickstarter campaign, which, as of this update, has achieved over four times its initial goal.

NASA

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

9/1/2015: NASA uses its classic meatball logo today for everything, but from the mid-70s to the early-90s, there was a different logo: the worm. Created by graphic design company Danne & Blackburn, the worm was intended to bring NASA more in line with graphic design principles befitting an entity going where no American (robotic or otherwise) had gone before.

As Liz Stinson at Wired details, the move was ... not popular, with nostalgists holding on to the logo, both within and outside of NASA. In 1992, NASA chief Dan Goldin killed "the worm" to boost morale, and the meatball has been back ever since.

Most Popular

But Danne & Blackburn didn't just overhaul a logo: they created an entire style bible for the agency, meant to instruct on everything, including letters from the agency. While it's been floating around in photos and other grainy facsimiles for years, but Jesse Reed and Hamish Smyth are raising money on Kickstarter to bring back the style manual in a high quality, hardcover format, befitting a coffee table or design studio.

There's just one pledge prize: $79, which will get you your own copy of the book. But for graphic design geeks, it may be just the price to pay to get a high quality version of a book that attempted to take NASA to the future of design, and got jettisoned in favor of the past. No public version has even been released, so the $150,000 Reed and Smyth want will go toward making that a reality. And they're already 2/3rds of the way to their goal with more than a month left. So why not drop a little (or a lot) of money on a layman's guide to a proper spaceship logo?